Posts Tagged ‘configuration’
the whereabouts of kernel module configuration
The salient point: just play with files inside /etc/modprobe.d/, as everything else is meant for backward compatibility.
Well this probably happens only to a dated gentoo installation where old conf files get orphaned. I was about to set some kernel module autoloading parameters, and was a bit confused seeing this:
$ ls -lad /etc/mod* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3587 May 2 2008 /etc/modprobe.conf drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 208 Mar 14 19:50 /etc/modprobe.d/ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2955 Dec 6 2007 /etc/modules.conf drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72 Jun 5 2008 /etc/modules.d/ $
The .conf files refer to two scripts, modules-update and update-modules, and the former doesn’t even exist. A man of the latter, however, clarifies everything. Here’s an excerpt from UPDATE-MODULES(8)
DESCRIPTION
update-modules is a simple tool to manage the module config files found
in the /etc/ directory.
The old Linux module utilities use a single file for all their configu-
ration. This makes it difficult for packages to dynamically add infor-
mation about their own modules.
update-modules makes the dynamic addition of information easier by gen-
erating the single configuration file from the many files located in
/etc/modules.d/. All files in that directory are assembled together to
form /etc/modules.conf.
Newer Linux module utilities include support automatically for a direc-
tory of configuration files in /etc/modprobe.d/. However, to maintain
backwards compatibility with packages that do not yet support this, we
still need to assemble the contents of /etc/modules.d/ and /etc/mod-
probe.d/ and produce the corresponding /etc/modules.conf and /etc/mod-
probe.conf.
Also, when requested, it is also possible to generate /etc/mod-
ules.devfs.
